“I instantly felt the impulse to write a patriotic hymn of my own adapted to the tune, (so) picking up a scrap of waste paper which lay near me, I wrote at once, probably within half an hour, this hymn.” Samuel F. Smith, 1829

We Lutherans and Baptists have been working together for a long time — we just haven't always known it.

Paul Harvey would call this “the REST of the story.”

Samuel Francis Smith was born in Newton Centre, Mass., in 1808. He was graduated from Harvard in 1829 in the same class as Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he graduated from Andover Theological Seminary in 1832.

Smith was editor of the Baptist Missionary Magazine for a year and a half, and from 1834 to 1842 was minister of a Baptist congregation in Waterville, Maine, and also professor of modern languages at Waterville College (now Colby College).

He returned to Newton Centre, where he served the First Baptist Church from 1842 until 1854 when he became secretary to the Baptist Missionary Union, a position he held until 1869. He died in 1895.

Samuel F. Smith wrote nearly 100 hymns, 26 of which were included in The Psalmist, which he edited and which contained 1,180 hymns. This hymnal is recognized as the finest hymnal the Baptists had created to that point and continues still to influence Baptist and other hymnals even today.

In 1880 Smith journeyed far from his native Massachusetts to tour the mission fields of Asia and Europe and returned to write a book encouraging the support of this important work.

Samuel F. Smith also had a son, The Rev. Dr. A. W. Smith, who was a Baptist missionary to Burma, where the younger Smith served as president of the theological seminary at Rangoon.

Back in 1829, as he was graduating from Harvard as a young man, Samuel F. Smith had a friend return from Europe with a number of German Lutheran music books, which the friend gave to mutual friend (and future famous hymn writer) Lowell Mason. Since Mason could not read German, he passed these books along to Smith.

Leafing through the books, Smith was struck by the German Lutheran hymn “Gott segne Sachsenland” (“God Bless Our Native Land”) and its tune by the German musician Siegfried August Mahlmann, whose children's songs are still known in Germany nearly 200 years later.

Smith recalled later about that night in 1829, “I instantly felt the impulse to write a patriotic hymn of my own adapted to the tune, (so) picking up a scrap of waste paper which lay near me, I wrote at once, probably within half an hour, this hymn.”

“My Country, `Tis of Thee” was first sung at a Fourth of July celebration at the Boston Sabbath School Union at Park Street Church in 1831, and has been in hymnals of all Christian denominations since.

Why not clip this great hymn from this paper, display it on your refrigerator or similar place of prominence, and let it be a part of your Fourth of July celebration this week?

My country, `tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing:

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring.

My native country, thee,

Land of the noble free,

Thy name I love;

I love thy rocks and rills,

Thy woods and templed hills;

My heart with rapture thrills

Like that above.

Let music swell the breeze,

And ring from all the trees

Sweet freedom's song;

Let mortal tongues awake;

Let all that breathe partake;

Let rocks their silence break,

The sound prolong.

Our fathers' God, to Thee,

Author of liberty,

To Thee we sing:

Long may our land be bright

With freedom's holy light.

Protect us by Thy might,

Great God, our King!

Happy Fourth! God Bless America!

(Kollmeyer is senior pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Fayetteville. He credits Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship, Marilyn Kay Stulken, editor, as his main source for this article.)

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